Gina Rinehart
always prefers to let her actions do the talking. But she will revel in a very personal way in the enthusiastic reaction to the $US7.2 billion ($7.9 billion) funding package for her Roy Hill iron ore project.

It’s not just a vote of international financial confidence in her business and the quality of the project. It’s also a giant rebuff to her many doubters in Australia who persisted in suggesting – to her perpetual fury – that she could never pull it off.

Media headlines regularly reflecting this sort of criticism were part of the backdrop to her big announcement in Singapore last week. This is a revenge moment as much a success story.

Rinehart and
Andrew Forrest
do not get on at all – even if they united briefly to publicly oppose the Rudd government’s mining tax.

But there’s another common thread that has also linked them for years.

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That is the extreme – and constantly confounded – scepticism in the broader Australian business community about what both West Australian entrepreneurs have spent years building in the Pilbara.

Forrest started later than
Hancock Prospecting
, with
Fortescue Metals Group
initially created out of little more than Forrest’s energy and ambition.

But within a few years he had managed to turn his company into a major force in iron ore exports – even while a lot of analysts were constantly declaring their doubts about the company’s viability.

With FMG now dramatically expanding production and reducing debt ahead of schedule, Forrest is spending most of his time on philanthropy, including the now-global effort to end slavery.

The obsessively private Rinehart has been steadily but quietly working on her own iron ore prospects for decades. But for most of that time, the prevailing view has been she was just benefiting financially from the efforts of others – whether it was the legacy of her father’s (heavily indebted) business that she took over more than 20 years ago, or the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to Hancock Prospecting via
Rio Tinto
and the shared ownership of the fabulously lucrative Hope Downs iron ore mine.

Passion for developing Australia’s north

More recently, the brutal family dynamics playing out in the court battle with some of her children has totally overshadowed her business efforts and her real passion – the development of Australia’s north.

Her determination to develop a major iron ore mine herself is part of that passion.

This required raising billions of dollars of debt, especially as she – like Forrest – was determined to maintain control.

In fact, Rinehart’s ownership grip is much tighter. Forrest has around one-third of the publicly traded Fortescue Metals Group.

What Rinehart has been focused on over the past few years is persuading what became a consortium of 19 banks, including Australia’s big four, and (ironically) three other countries’ export credit agencies, to all back the project to the tune of $US7.2 billion.

Not that the delay in getting this finally sorted out has stopped progress on the $10 billion project – about 340 kilometres inland from Port Hedland.

It’s already about 30 per cent built, mostly funded by contributions from the partners. About 2500 people are on site – rising to 3600 later this year. As well as the mine, it involves port and rail development.

That also makes Roy Hill one of the few major resources projects in Australia under construction – something of great interest to politicians looking for jobs growth.

The former Labor government got itself into difficulties with its own caucus by agreeing to an enterprise migration agreement for Roy Hill that allowed use of up to 1700 foreign workers during construction.

Despite the inevitable union furore, this was primarily to reassure international financiers it would be possible to find workers at a time of great shortages during the peak of the resources boom. There’s no real need to use the agreement now because of the glut of Australians looking for such work. Such is the uncertainty of the investment cycle when Australian costs have gone up so much and most resources companies are putting any new projects on indefinite hold.

The plan is to start shipping iron ore from Roy Hill by September next year on the way to producing 55 million tonnes a year of extremely high grade ore by 2018.

The quality of the ore, and relatively low-cost production, mean the banks were clearly not put off by the market’s predictions of the increasing global supply of iron ore leading to falling prices long term. Nor by occasional abrupt falls in the iron ore price – evident again recently – as the market decides to worry about the latest blip in China’s growth figures or steel consumption.

Rinehart says she is immensely proud that Hancock, as a wholly owned West Australian company, is taking the lead on such a significant project.

“Roy Hill is a crucible of opportunity during a period of global uncertainty," she declared last week. “It has already shown it will create new jobs, and benefit the greater mining and construction-related industries, it will add to Australia’s exports, and significantly benefit our West Australian and national economy."